Superman inside and out – Has it really been 35 years since fans have been given a great Superman movie?

In theaters Friday: Man of Steel, This is the End

New on Blu-ray: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Oz the Great and Powerful

Has it really been 35 years since fans have been given a great Superman movie? Unless you are incredibly apologetic for any product related to the son of Krypton—hey, I loved my lunchbox, too—the answer has to be yes.

After Richard Donner’s landmark 1978 Superman introduced Christopher Reeve as the “Man of Steel” and created a new template for the modern super hero, we’ve had Richard Lester’s rush-job sequel that was equal parts fun (any scene with Terrence Stamp’s Zod) and groan-inducing (Superman having to give up his powers to marry Lois), the one with Richard Pryor and a supercomputer, and then the one with the villain who looked like the spawn of Barry Gibb and George Hamilton.

After a 19-year hiatus, Bryan Singer’s lukewarm Superman Returns arrived in 2006 and worked fine as a love-letter to Donner’s original—complete with a Marlon Brando cameo thanks to a little computer-assisted grave-digging and a truly great performance by lead Brandon Routh—but any serious attempt to reignite the franchise was scuttled by the movie’s somnambulant tone, an over the top turn as Lex Luthor by Kevin Spacey, and a script with a surprising lack of real thrills.

Warner Brothers’ lesson from Returns was clear. Superman can be dark, he can even be a dad, just don’t make him maudlin.

Even if you’ve been living under a rock of Kryptonite you know that the latest Superman film, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, arrives on Friday, and I predict right now that it will break box office records. Like Returns, this too promises to be a more serious, relatively realistic take on the world’s most popular caped hero. But unlike Singer, this time Snyder (Watchmen), screenwriter David Goyer (Batman Begins) and producer Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) seem to have figured out what the X-Men director didn’t: Once you define who Clark Kent (Kal-El, Superman) is at his core, his values and his fears, then you can deliver any spectacles you want, but you have to start small first, instead of envisioning a grand apparatus and then searching for ways to add heart.

The latter misstep has often translated into lazy ways of bringing Superman down a peg—typically cheesy roundabouts that simply axed the “super” out to leave only the “man.” Clark gets drunk in a diner and trash talks a bully; he wrestles with an evil version of himself in a junkyard; He’s just like you and me!

But we don’t need to see Superman lose his powers or stalkerishly moping over a lost love in order to identify with him. At his essence, Superman is someone who knows with every (admittedly unbreakable) bone in his body that he is called to do something, something noble, something that he is capable of doing, but a calling that will never be easy. Last time I checked, that’s everyone.

Driving this point home with a character-filled script frees up Snyder and his stellar cast that includes Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon and Russell Crowe to make Man of Steel the biggest, wildest, most Michael Bay-est epic ever. Which is just as it should be, as long as we feel something. And we will.

Because this is not Superman gone dark. It’s Superman from the inside out. The one we’ve been waiting a generation for.

Man of Steel opens wide June 14. Watch the trailer below: